"After some time be past" : speech of Hon. C.L. Vallandigham, of Ohio, on executive usurpation, in the House of Representatives, July 10, 1861

AFTER SOME TIME BE PAST.

SPEECH

OF

HON. C, L. VALLANDIGHAM, OF OHIO,

ON EXECUTIVE USURPATION:

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JULY 10, 1861.

Mr. VALLANDIGHAM said:

Mr. Chairman: In the Constitution of the Uni-
ted States, which the other day we swore to sup-
port, and by the authority of which we are here
assennbled now, it is written:

" All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in
a Congress of the United States."

It is further written also that the Congress to
which all legislative powers granted are thus com-
mitted—

" Shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or
of the, press."

And it is yet further written, in protection of
Senators and Representatives in that freedom of
debate here,without which there can be no liberty,
that— -

" For any speech or debate in either House they shall not
be questioned in any other place."

Holding up the shield of the Constitution, and
standing here in the place and with the manhood
of a Representative of the people, I propose to
myself, to-day, the ancient freedom of speech
used within these walls; though with somewhat
more, I trust, of decency and discretion than have
sometimes been exhibited here. Sir, I do not
propose to discuss the direct question of this
civil war in which we are engaged. Its present
prosecution is a foregone conclusion; and a wise
man never wastes his strength on a fruitless
enterprise. My position shall at present, for the
most part, be indicated by my votes, and by the
resolutions and motions which I may submit.
But there are many questions incident to the war
and to its prosecution, about which I have some-
v/hat to say now.

Mr. Chairman, the President, in the message
before us, demands the extraordinary loan of
$400,000,000 — an amount nearly ten times greater
than the entire public debt. State and Federal, at
the close of the Revolution in 1783, and four times
as muoli as the total expenditures during the three
years' war with Great Britain, in 1812.

Sir, that same Constitution which I again hold
up, and to which I give my whole heart and my

utmost loyalty, commits to Congress alone the
power to borrow money and to fix the purposes
to which it shall be applied, and expressly limits
Army appropriations to the term of two years.
Each Senator and Representative, therefore, must
judge for himself, upon his conscience and his
oath, and before God and the country,of the jus-
tice and wisdom and policy of the President's
demand; and whenever this House shall have
become but a mere office wherein to register the
decrees of the Executive, it will be high time to
abolish it. But I have a right, I believe, sir, to
say that, however gentlemen upon this side of
the Chamber may differ finally as to the war, we
are yet firmly and inexorably united in one thing
at least, and that is in the determination that our
own rights and dignities and privileges, as the
Representatives of the people, shall be maintained
in their spirit and to the very letter. And be this
as it may, I do know that there are some here
present who are resolved to assert and to exercise
these rights, with becoming decency and modera-
tion certainly, but at the same time fully, freely,
and at every hazard.

Sir, it is an ancient and wise practice of the
English Commons, to precede all votes of sup-
plies by an inquiry into abuses and grievances,
and especially into any infractions of the constitu-
tion and the laws by the Executive. Let us follow
this safe practice. We are now in Committee
of the Whole oil the state of the Union; and in the'
exercise of my right and my duty as a Repre-
sentative, and availing myself of the latitude of
debate allowed here, I propose to consider the
PRESENT STATE OF THE Union, and supply also
some few of the many omissions of the Presi-
dent in the message before us. Sir, he has un-
dertaken to give us information of the state of the
Union, as the Constitution requires him to do;
and it was his duty, as an honest Executive, to
make that information full, impartial, and com-
plete, instead of spreading before us a labored
and lawyerly vindication of his own course of
policy — a policy which has precipitated us into a
terrible and bloody revolution. He admits the

fact; he admits that, to-day, we are in the midst
of a general civil war, not nov/ a mere petty
insurrection, to be suppressed in twenty days by
a proclamation and a posse comitatus of three
months' militia.

Sir, it has been the misfortune of the President
from the beginning, that he has totally and wholly
underestimated the magnitude and character of the
Revolution with which he had to deal, or surely
he never would have ventured upon the wicked
and hazardous experiment of calling thirty mil-
lions of people to arms among themselves, with-
out the counsel and authority of Congress. But
when at last he found himself hemmed in by
the revolution, and this city in danger, as he
declares, and waked up thus, as the proclamation
of the 15th of April proves him to have waked
up, to the reality and significance of the move-
ment, why did he not forthwith assemble Con-
gress, and throw himself upon the wisdom and
patriotism of the representatives of the States and
of the people, instead of usurping powers which
the Constitution has expressly conferred upon us?
ay, sir, and powers which Congress had but a
little while before, repeatedly and emphatically
refused to exercise, or to permit him to exercise ?
But 1 shall recur to this point again.

Sir, the President, in this message, has under-
taken also to give us a summary of the causes
v/hich have led to the present revolution. He
has made out a case — he might, in my judgment,
have made out a much stronger case — against the
secessionists and disunionists of the South. All
this, sir, is very well as far as it goes. But the
President does not go back far enough, nor in the
right direction. He forgets the still stronger case
against the abolitionists and disunionists of the
North and West. He omits to tell us that seces-
sion and disunion had a New England origin, and
began in Massachusetts in 1804 at the time of the
Louisiana purchase; were revived by the Hart-
ford convention in 1814, and culminated, during
the war with Great Britain, in sending commis-
sioners to Washington to settle the terms for a
peaceable separation of New England from the
other States of the Union. He forgets to remind
us and the country, that this present revolution
began forty years ago, in the vehement, persistent,
offensive, most irritating and unprovoked agita-
tion of the SLAVERY QUESTION in the North and
West, from the time of the Missouri controversy,
with some short intervals, down to the present
hour. Sir, if his statement of the case be the
whole truth and wholly correct, then the Demo-
cratic party and every member ofit, and the Whig
party, too, and its predecessors, have been guilty
for sixty years of an unjust, unconstitutional, and
most wicked policy in administering the affairs of
the Government.

But, sir, the President ignores totally the vio-
lent and long-continued denunciation of slavery
and slaveholders, and especially since 1835 — I
appeal to Jackson's message for the date and
proof — until at last a political anti-slavery organ-
ization was formed in the North and West, which
continued to gain strength year after year, till at
length it had destroyed and usurped the place of
the Whig party, and finally obtained control of
every free State in the Union, and elected himself,
through free-State votes alone, to the Presidency
of the United States. He chooses to pass over

the fact that the party to which he thus owes his
place and hispresentpower of mischief, is wholly
and totally a sectional organization; and as such
condemned by Washington, by Jefferson, by
Jackson , Webster, and Clay, and by all the found-
ers and preservers of the Republic, and utterly
inconsistent with the principles, or with the peace,
the stability or the existence even, of our Federal
system. Sir, there never was an hour, from the
organization of this sectional party, when it was
not predicted by the wisest men and truest pa-
triots, and when it ought not to have been known
by every intelligent man in the country, that it
must sooner or later precipitate a revolution and
the dissolution of the Union. The President
forgets already that, on the 4th of March, he de-
clared that the platform of that party was " a law
unto him," b)?- which he meant to be governed
in his administration; and yet that platform an-
nounced that whereas there were two separate
and distinct kinds of labor and forms of civiliza-
tion in the two different sections of the Union,
yet that the entire national domain, belonging in
common to all the States, should be taken, pos-
sessed, and held by one section alone, and con-
secrated to that kind of labor and form of civili-
zation alone which prevailed in that section which
by mere numerical superiority, had chosen the
President, and now has, and for some years past
has had, a majority in the Senate, as from the
beginning of the Government it had also in the
House. He omits, too, to tell the country and
the world — for he speaks, and we all speak now,
to the world and to posterity — that he himself and
his prime minister, the Secretary of State, de-
clared three years ago, and have maintained ever
since, that there was an "irrepressible conflict"
between the two sections of this Union; that the
Union could not endure part slave and part free;
and that the whole power and influence of the
Federal Government must henceforth be exerted
to circumscribe and hem in slavery within its ex-
isting limits.

And now, sir, how comes it that the President
has forgotten to remind us, also, that when the
party thus committed to the principle of deadly
hate and hostility to the slave institutions of the
South, and the men who had proclaimed the doc-
trine of the irrepressible conflict, and who, in the
dilemma or alternative of this conflict, were re-
solved that " the cotton and rice fields of South
Carolina, and the sugar plantations of Louisiana,
should ultimately be tilled by free labor," had ob-
tained power and place in the common Govern-
ment of the States, the South, except one State,
chose first to demand solemn constitutional guar-
antees for protection against the abuse of the tre-
mendous power and patronage and influence of
the Federal Government, for the purpose of se-
curing the great end of the sectional conflict, be-
fore resorting to secession or revolution at all?
Did he not know — how could he be ignorant — that
at the last session of Congress, every substantive
proposition for adjustment and compromise, ex-
cept that offered by the gentleman from Illinois,
[Mr. Kellogg] — and we all know how it was
received — came from the South? Stop a moment,
and let us see.

The committee of thirty-three was moved for
in this House by a gentleman from Virginia, the
second day of the session, and received the vote

of every soutliern Representative present, except
only the members from South Carolina, who de-
clined to vote. In the Senate, the committee of thir-
teen was proposed by a Senator from Kentucky,
[Mr.PowELL,]andreceivedthesi]entacquiescence
of every southern Senatorpresent. The Crittenden
propositions, too, were submitted also by another
Senator from Kentucky, [Mr. Crittenden,] now
a member of this House; a man venerable for his
years, loved for his virtues, distinguished for his
services, honored for his patriotism; forfour-and-
forty years a Senator, or in other public office;
devoted from the first hour of his manhood to the
Union of these States; and who, though he him-
self proved his courage fifty years ago, upon the
battle-field against the foreign enemies of his coun-
try, is now, thank God, still for compromise at
home, to-day. Fortunate in a long and well spent
life of public service and private worth, he is
unfortunate only that he has survived a Union
and, I fear, a Constitution younger than him-
self.

The Border State propositions also were pro-
jected by a gentleman from Maryland, not now a
member of this House, and presented by a gen-
tleman from Tennessee, (Mr. Etheridge,) now
the Clerk of this House. And yet all these prop-
ositions, coming thus from the South, were sev-
erally and repeatedly rejected by the almost uni-
ted vote of the Republican party in the Senate and
the House. The Crittenden propositions, with
which Mr. Davis, now President of the Confed-
erate States, and Mr. Toombs, his secretary of
State, both declared in the Senate that they would
be satisfied, and for which every southern Sena-
tor and Representative voted, never, on any oc-
casion, received one soHtary vote from the Re-
publican party in either House.

The Adams or Corwin amendment, so-called,
reported from the committee of thirty -three, and
the only substantive amendment proposed from
the Republican side, was but a bare promise that
Congress should never be authorized to do what
r|o sane man ever believed Congress would at-
tempt to do — abolish slavery in the States where it
exists; and yet even this proposition, moderate
as it was, and for which every southern membef
present voted, except one, was carried through
this House by but one majority, after long and
tedious delay, and with the utmost difficulty —
sixty-five Republican members, with the resolute
and determined gentleman from Pennsylvania
[Mr. Hickman] at theirhead, having voted against
it and fought against it to the very last.

And not this only, but, as a part of the history
of the last session, let me remind you that bills
were introduced into this House proposing to
abolish and close up certain southern ports of
entry; to authorize the President to blockade the
southern coast; and to call out the militia and
accept the services of volunteers, not for three
years merely, but without any limit as to either
numbers or time, for the very purpose of enforcing
the laws, collecting the revenue, and protecting the
public property ; and were pressed vehemently and
earnestly in this House piior to the arrival of the
President in this cittjy and were then, though seven
States had seceded and set up a government of
their own, voted down, postponed, thrust aside,
or in some other way disposed of, sometimes by
large majorities in this House, till at last Congress

adjourned without any action at all. Peace then
seemed to be the policy of all parties.

Thus, sir, the case stood at twelve o'clock on
on the 4th of March last, when, from the eastern
portico of this Capitol, and in the presence of
twenty thousand of his countrymen, but envel-
oped in a cloud of soldiery which no other Amer-
ican President ever saw, Abraham Lincoln took
the oath of office to supportthe Constitution, and
delivered his inaugural — a message, I regret to
say, not written in the direct and straightforward
language which becomes an American President
and an American statesman, and which was ex-
pected from the plain, blunt, honest man of the
Northwest, but with the forked tongue and
crooked counsel of the New York politician,
leaving thirty millions of people in doubt whether
it meant peace or war. But whatever may have
been the secret purpose and meaning of the in-
augural, practically for six weeks the policy of
peace prevailed; and they were weeks of happi-
ness to the patriot, and prosperity to the country.
Business revived; trade returned; commerce flour-
ished. Never was there a fairer prospect before
any people. Secession in the past languished,
and was spiritless and harmless; secession in the
future was arrested, and perished. By over-
whelming majorities, Virginia, Kentucky, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri all declared
for the old Union, and every heart beat high with
hope that in due course of time, and through faith
and patience and peace, and by ultimate^and ade-
equate compromise, every State would be restored
to it. It is true, indeed, sir, that the Republican
party, with great unanimity and great earnest-
ness and determination, had resolved against all
conciliation and compromise. But, on the other
hand, the whole Democratic party, and the whole
Constitutional Union party , were equally resolved
that there should be no civil war upon any pre-
text; and both sides prepared for an appeal to
that great and final arbiter of all disputes in
free country — the people.

Sir, I do not propose to inquire now whether
the President and his Cabinet were sincere and in
earnest, and meant really to persevere to the end
in the policy of peace; or whether from the first
they meant civil war, and only waited to gain
time till they were fairly seated in power, and
had disposed, too, of that prodigious horde of
spoilsmen and office seekers, which came down at
the first like an avalanche upon them ? But I do
know that the people believed them sincere, and
cordially ratified and approved^ of the policy of
peace; not as they subsequently responded to
the policy of war, in a whirlwind of passion
and madness, but calmly and soberly, and as
the result of their deliberate and most solemn
judgment; and believing that civil war was ab-
solute and eternal disunion, while secession was
but partial and temporary, they cordially in-
dorsed also the proposed evacuation of Sumter
and the other forts and public property within
the seceded States. Nor, sir, will I stop now
to explore the several causes which either led to
a change in the apparent policy or an early devel-
opment of the original and real purposes of the
Administration. But there are two which I can-
not pass by. And the first of these was party ne-
cessity, or the clamor of politicians, and espe-
cially of certain wicked , reckless, and unprincipled

conductors of a partisan press. The peace policy
was crushing out the Republican party. Under
that policy, sir, it was melting away like snow
before the sun. The general elections in Rhode
Island and Connecticut, and municipal elections
in New York and in the western States, gave
abundant evidence that the people were resolved
upon the most ample and satisfactory constitu-
tional guarantees to the South as the price of a
restoration of Union. And then it was, sir, that
the long and agonizing howl of defeated and dis-
appointed politicians came up before the Admin-
istration. The newspaper press teemed with
appeals and threats to the President. The mails
groaned under the weight of letters demanding a
change of policy; while a secret conclave of the
Governors of Massachusetts, New York, Ohio,
and other States, assembled here, promised men
and money to support the President in the irre-
pressible conflict which they now invoked. And
thus it was, sir, that the necessities of a party in
the pangs of dissolution, in the very hour and
article of death, demanding vigorous measures,
which could result in nothing but civil war, re-
newed secession, and absolute and eternal dis-
union, were preferred and hearkened to before the
peace and harmony and prosperity of the whole
country.

But there was another and yet stronger im-
pelling cause without which this horrid calamity
of civil war might have been postponed, and, per-
haps, finally averted. One of the last and worst
acts of a Congress, which, born in bitterness and
nurtured in convulsion, literally did those things
which it ought not to have done, and left undone
those things which it ought to have done, was the
passage of an obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested,
and unstatesmanlike high protective tariff act,
commonly known as "the Morrill tariff."
Just about the same time, too, the Confederate
Congress at Montgomery adopted our old tariff
of 1857, which we had rejected to make way for
the Morrill act, fixing their rate of duties at five,
fifteen, and twenty per cent, lower than ours.
The result was as inevitable as the laws of trade
are inexorable. Trade and commerce — and espe-
cially the trade and commerce of the West — be-
gan to look to the South. Turned out of their
natural course years ago, by the canals and rail-
roads of Pennsylvania and New York, and di-
verted eastward at a heavy loss to the West, they
threatened now to resume their ancient and ac-
customed channels — the water-courses — the Ohio
and the Mississippi. And political association
andiUnion, it was well known, must soon follow
the direction of trade and interest. The city of
New York, the great commercial emporium of
the Union, and the Northwest, the chief granary
of the Union, began to clamor now loudly for a
repeal ofthe pernicious and ruinous tariff. Threat-
ened thus with the loss of both political power
and wealth, or the repeal ofthe tariff, and at last
of both. New England — and Pennsylvania, too,
the land ofPenn, cradled in peace — demanded now
coercion and civil war, with all its horrors, as the
price of preserving either from destruction. Ay,
sir, Pennsylvania, the great keystone of the arch
of the Union , was willing to lay the whole weight
of her iron upon that sacred arch, and crush it
beneath the load. The subjugation ofthe South —
ay, sir, the subjugation of the South ! I am not

talking to children or fools; for there is not a
man in this House fit to be a Representative here
who does not know that the South cannot be
forced to yield obedience to your laws and author-
ity again until you have conquered and subjugated
her — the subjugation of the South, and the clos-
ing up of her ports, first by force, in war, and
afterwards by tariff laws, in peace, was deliber-
ately resolved upon by the East. And, sir, when
once this policy was begun, these self-same mo-
tives of waning commerce and threatened loss of
trade impelled the great city of New York, and her
merchants and her politicians and her press, with
here and there an honorable exception, to place
herself in the very front rank among the wor-
shipers of Moloch. Much, indeed, of that out-
burst and uprising in the North, which followed
the proclamation ofthe 15th of April, as well, per-
haps, as the proclamation itself, was called forth,
not so much by the fall of Sumter — an event long
anticipated — as by the notion that the " insurrec-
tion," as it was called, might be crushed out in a
few weeks, if not by the display, certainly, at
least, by the presence of an overwhelming force.

These, sir, were the chief causes which, along
with others, led to a change in the policy of the
Administration, and, instead of peace, forced us
headlong into civil war, with all its accumulated
horrors.

But whatever may have been the causes or the
motives of the act, it is certain that there was a
change in the policy which the Administration
meant to adopt, or which at least they led the
country to believe they intended to pursue. I will
not venture now to assert, what may yet someday
be made to appear, that the subsequent acts ofthe
i\d ministration, and its enormous and persistent
infractions of the Constitution, its high-handed
usurpations of power, formed any part of a delib-
erate conspiracy to overthrow the present form
of Federal republican government, and to estab-
lish a strong centralized Government in its stead.
No, sir; whatever their purposes now, I rather
think that, in the beginning, they rushed heed-
lessly and headlong into the gulf, believing that,
as the seat of war was then far distant and diffi-
cult of access, the display of vigor in reinforcing
Sumter and Pickens, and in calling out seventy-
five thousand militia upon the firing of the first
gun, and above all, in that exceedingly happy
and original conceit of commanding the insurgent
States to *' disperse in twenty days," would not,
on the one hand, precipitate a crisis, while, upon
the other, it would satisfy its own violent parti-
sans, and thus revive and restore the falling for-
tunes of the Republican party.

I can hardly conceive, sir, that the President
and his advisers could be guilty of the exceeding
folly of expecting to carry on a general civil war
by a mere posse comitatus of three-months militia.
It may be, indeed, that, with wicked and most
desperate cunning, thePresident meant all this as
a mere entering wedge to that which was to rive
the oak asunder; or possibly as a test, to learn
the publicsentimentof the North and West. But,
however that 'may be, the rapid secession and
movements of Virginia, North Carolina, Ark-
ansas, and Tennessee, taking with them, as I have
said elsewhere, four millions and a half of people,
immense wealth, inexhaustible resources, five
hundred thousand fighting men, and the graves of

5

Washington and Jackson, and bringing up too, in
one single day, the frontier from the Gulf to tlie
Ohio and the Potomac, together with the aban-
donment by the one side, and the occupation by
the other, of Harper's Ferry and the Norfolk
navy-yard; and the fierce gust and whirlwind of
passion in the North, compelled either a sudden
waking up of the President and his advisers to
the frightful significancy of the act which they
had committed in heedlessly breaking the vase
which imprisoned the slumbering demon of civil
war, or else a premature but most rapid develop-
ment of the daring plot to foster and promote
secession, and then to set up a new and strong
form of Government in the States which might
remain in the Union.

But whatever may have been the purpose, I
assert here to-day, as a Representative, that every
principal act of the Administration since, has been
a glaring usurpation of power, and a palpable and
dangerous violation of that very Constitution
which this civil war is professedly waged to sup-
port. Sir, I pass by the proclamation of the 15th
of April, summoning the militia — not to defend
this capital; there is not a word about the capital
in the proclamation, and there was then no pos-
sible danger to it from any quarter; but to retake
and occupy forts and property a thousand miles
off — summoning, I say, the militia to suppress
the so-called insurrection. I do not believe
indeed, and no man believed in February last,
when Mr. Stanton, of Ohio, introduced his bill to
enlarge the act of 1795, that that act ever contem-
plated the case of a general revolution, and of
resistance by an organized Government. But
no matter. The militia thus called out, with a
shadow, at least, of authority, and for a period
extending one month beyond the assembling of
Congress, were amply sufficient to protect the cap-
ital against any force which was then likely to be
sent against it — and the event has proved it — and
ample enough also to suppress the outbreak in
Maryland. Every other principal act of the Ad-
ministration might well have been postponed, and
ought to have been postponed, until the meeting
of Congress; or, if the exigencies of the occasion
demanded it. Congress should forthwith have
been assembled. What if two or three States
should not have been represented, although even
this need not have happened; but better this, a
thousand times, than that the Constitution should
be repeatedly and flagrantly violated, and public
liberty and private right trampled under foot. As
for Harper's Ferry and the Norfolk navy-yard,
they rather needed protection against the Admin-
istration, b)'- whose orders millions of property
were wantonly destroyed, which was not in the
slightest danger from any quarter, at the date of
the proclamation.

But, sir, Congress was not assembled at once,
as Congress should have been, and the great ques-
tion of civil war submitted to their deliberations.
The representatives of the States and of the peo-
ple were not allowed the slightest voice in this the
most momentous question ever presented to any
Government. The entire responsibility of the
whole work was boldly assumed by the Exec-
utive, and all the powers required for the purposes
in hand were boldly usurped from either the States
or the people, or from the legislative department;
while the voice of the judiciary, that last refuge

and hope of liberty, was turned away from with
contempt.

Sir, the right of blockade — and I begin with
it — is a belligerent right, incident to a state of
war, and it cannot be exercised until war has
been declared or recognized; and Congress alone
can declare or recognize war. But Congress had
not declared or recognized war. On the contrary,
they had but a little while before expressly refused
to declare it, or to arm the President with the
power to make it. And thus the President, in
declaring a blockade of certain ports in the States
of the South, and in applying to it the rules gov-
erningblockadesas between independentPowers,
violated the Constitution.

But if, on the other hand, he meant to deal with
these States as still in the Union, and subject to
Federal authority, then he usurped a power which
belongs to Congress alone — the power to abolish
and close up ports of entry; a power, too, which
Congresshad also butafew weeks before refused to
exercise. And yet, without the repeal or abolition
of ports of entry, any attempt by either Congress
or the President to blockade these ports is a vio-
lation of the spirit, if not of the letter, of that clause
of the Constitution which declares that **no pref-
erence shall be given by any regulation of com-
merce or revenue to the ports of one State over
those of another."

Sir, upon this point I do not speak without the
highest authority. ^ In the very midst of tfie South
Carolina nullification controversy, it was sug-
gested that in the recess of Congress, and with-
out a law to govern him, the President, Andrew
Jackson, meant to send down a fleet to Charles-
ton and blockade the port. But the bare sugges-
tion called forth the indignant protest of Daniel
Webster, himself the archenemy of nullification,
and whose brightest laurels were won in the three
years'- conflict in the Senate. Chamber with its
ablest champions. In an address, in October,
1832, at Worcester, Massachusetts, to a National
Republican convention — it was before the birth,
or christening at least, of the Whig party — the
great expounder of the Constitution said:

" We are told, sir, that the President will immediately
employ the military force, and at once blockade Charles
ton I A military remedy, a remedy by direct belligerent
operation, has thus been suggested, and nothing else has
been suggested, as the intended means of preserving the
Union. Sir, there is no little reason to think that this sug-
gestion is true. We cannot be altogether unmindful of the
past, and therefore we cannot be altogether unapprehensive
for the future. For one, sir, I raise my voice beforehand
against the unauthorized employment of military power,
and against superseding the authority of the laws, by an
armed force, under pretense of putting down nullification.
The President has no authority to blockade Charleston.''^

Jackson ! Jackson, sir ! the great Jackson ! did
not dare to do it without authority of Congress;
but our Jackson of to-day, the little Jackson at
the other end of the avenue, and the mimic Jack-
sons around him, do blockade, not only Claries-
ton harbor, but the whole southern coast, three
thousand miles in extent, by a single stroke of
the pen.

« The President has no authority to employ military force
till he shall be duly required" —

Mark the word:

^'required so to do by law and the civil authorities. His
duty is to cause the laws to be executed. His duty is to
support the civil authority'^ —

6

As in the Merryman case, forsooth; but I shall
recur to that hereafter:

" His duty is, if the laws be resisted, to employ the mil-
itary force of the country, if necessary, for their support
and execution ; bttt to do all this in compliance only with law
and with decisions of the tribunals. If, by any Ingenious
devices, those who resist the laws escape from the reach
of judicial authority, as it is now provided to be exercised,
it is entirely competent to Congress to make sucli new pro-
visions as the exigency of the case may demand."

Treason , sir, rank treason , all this to-day. And
yet, thirty years ago, it was true Union patriot-
ism and sound constitutional law! Sir. I prefer
the wisdom and stern fidelity to principle of the
fathers.

Such was the voice of "Webster, and such too,
let me add, the voice, in his last great speech in
the Senate, of the Douglas, whose death the land
now mourns.

Next after the blockade, sir, in the catalogue
of daring executive usurpations, comes the proc-
lamation of the 3d of May, and the orders of the
War and Navy Departments in pursuance of it —
a proclamation and usurpation which would havb
cost any English sovereign his head at anytime
within the last two hundred years. Sir, the Con-
stitution not only confines to Congress the right
to declare war, but expressly provides that *' Con-
gress (not the President) shall have power to
raise and support armies;" and to *' provide and
maintain*a navy . " In pursuance of this authority,
Congress, years ago, had fixed the number of offi-
cers, and of the regiments, of the different kinds
of service; and also the number of ships, officers,
marines, and seamen which should compose the
Navy. Not only that, but Congress has repeat-
edly, within the last five years, refused to increase
the regular Army. More than that still: in Feb-
ruary and March last, the House, upon several
test votes, repeatedly and expressly refused to
authorize the President to accept the service of
volunteers for the very purpose of protecting the
public property, enforcing the laws, and collect-
ing the revenue. And yet the President, of his
own mere will and authority, and without the
shadow of right, has proceeded to increase, and
has increased, the standing Army by twenty-five
thousand men; the Navy by eighteen thousand;
and has called for and accepted the services of
forty regiments of volunteers for three years, num-
bering forty-two thousand men, and making thus
a grand army or military force, raised by execu-
tive proclamation alone, without the sanction of
Congress, without warrant of law, and in direct
violation of the Constitution and of his oath of
office, of eighty-five thousand soldiers enlisted for
three and five years, and already in the field. And
yet the Presiden t now asks us to support the A rmy
which he has thus raised; to ratify his usurpations
by a law ex post facto, and thus to make ourselves
parties to our own degradation, and to his infrac-
tions of the Constitution. Meanwhile, however,
he has taken good care, not only to enlist the men,
organize the regiments, and muster them into ser-
vice, but to provide in advance for a horde of for-
lorn , wornout, and broken down politicians of his
own party, by appointing, either by himself or
through the Governors of the States, major gen-
erals, brigadier generals, colonels, lieutenant col-
onels, majors, captains, lieutenants, adjutants,
quartermasters, and surgeons, without any limit

as to numbers, and without so much as once saying
to Congress — " By your leave, gentlemen."

Beginning with this wide breach of the Consti-
tution , this enormous usurpation of the most dan-
gerous of all powers — the power of the sword —
other infractions and assumptions were easy; and
after public liberty, private right soon fell. The
privacy of the telegraph was invaded in the search
after treason and traitors; although it turns out,
significantly enough, that the only victim, so far,
is one of the appointees and especial pets of the
Administration. The telegraphic dispatches, pre-
served under every pledge of secrecy for the pro-
tection and safety of the telegraph companies, were
seized and carried away without search warrant,
without probable cause, without oath, and with-
out description of the places to be searched or of
the things to be seized, and in plain violation of
the right of the people to be secure in their houses,
persons, papers, and effects, agamst unreasonable
searches and seizures. One step more, sir, will
bring upon us search and seizure of the public
mails; and finally, as in the worst days of Eng-
lish oppression — as in the times of the Russells
and the Sydneys of English martyrdom — of the
drawers and secretaries of the private citizen;
though even then tyrants had the grace to look
to the forms of the law, and the execution was
judicial murder, not military slaughter. But who
shall say that the future Tiberius of America shall
have the modesty of his Roman predecessor, in
extenuation of whose character it is written by
the great historian, avertit occulos, jussitque scelera
non spectavit.

Sir, the rights of property having been thus
wantonly violated, it needed but a little stretch
of usurpation to invade the sanctity of the person ;
and a victim was not long wanting. A private
citizen of Maryland, not subject to the rules and
articles of war — not in a case arising in the land
or naval forces, nor in the militia when in actual
service — is seized in his own house, in the dead
hour of night, not by any civil ofiicer, nor upon
any civil process, but by a band of armed sol-
diers, under the verbal orders of a militar)^ chief,
and is ruthlessly torn from his wife and his chil-
dren, and hurried off to a fortress of the United
States — and that fortress, as if in mockery, the
very one over whose ramparts had floated that
star-spangled banner immortalized in song by the
patriot prisoner w^ho,

" By the dawn's early light,"
saw its folds gleaming amid the wreck of battle,
and invoked the blessings of Heaven upon it, and
prayed that it might long wave —

<' O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."

And, sir, when the highest judicial officer of
the land, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
upon whose shoulders, "when the judicial er-
mine fell, it touched nothing not as spotless as it-
self," the aged, the venerable, the gentle and pure
minded Taney, who but a little while before had
administered to the President the oath to support
the Constitution and to execute the laws, issued,
as by law it was his sworn duty to issue, the high
prerogative writ of habeas corpus — that great writ
of right, that main bulwark of personal liberty,
commanding the body of the accused to be brought
before him that justice and right might be done
by due course of law, and without denial or de-

lay; the gates of the fortress, its cannon turned
towards, and in plain sight of the city where the
court sat, and frowning from the ramparts, were
closed against the officer of the law, and the an-
swer returned that the officer in command has, by
the authority of the President, suspended the writ
of habeas corpus. And thus it is, sir, that the
accused has ever since been held a prisoner with-
out due process of law; without bail; without
presentment by a grand jury; without speedy
or public trial by a petit jury of his own State
or district, or any trial at all; without informa-
tion of the nature and cause of the accusation;
without being confronted with the witnesses
against him; without compulsory process to ob-
tain witnesses in his favor; and without the
assistance of counsel for his defense. And this
is our boasted American liberty? And thus it is,
too, sir, that here, here, in America, in the sev-
enty-third year of the Republic, that great writ
and security of personal freedom which it cost
the patriots and freemen of England six hundred
years of labor and toil and blood to extort and
to hold fast from venal judges and tyrant kings;
written in the great charter at Runnymede by the
•iron barons, who made the simple Latin and un-
couth words of the times, nullus liber homo, in the
language of Chatham, worth all the classics; re-
covered and confirmed a hundred times afterwards,
as often as violated and stolen away , and finally and
firmly secured at last by the great act of Charles
II, and transferred thence to our own Constitu-
tion and laws, has been wantonly and ruthlessly
trampled in the dust. Ay, sir, that great writ,
bearing, by special command of Parliament, those-
other uncouth but magic words, per statutum tri-
cessimo primo Caroli secundi regis, which no Eng-
lish judge, no English minister, no king or queen
of England, dare disobey; that writ brought over
by our fathers and cherished by them as a price-
less inheritance of liberty, an American Presi-
dent has contemptuously set at defiance. Nay,
more, he has ordered his subordinate military
chiefs to suspend it at their discretion ! And yet,
after all this, he coolly comes before this House
and the Senate and the country, and pleads that
he is only preserving and protecting the Consti-
tution; and demands and expects of this House
and of the Senate and the country their thanks
for his usurpations; while outside of this Cap-
itol, his myrmidons are clamoring for impeach-
ment of the Chief Justice, as engaged in a con-
spiracy to break down the Federal Government!
Sir, however much necessity — the tyrant's
plea — may be urged in extenuation of the usurp-
ations and infractions of the President in regard
to public liberty, there can be no such apology or
defense for his invasions of private right. What
overruling necessity required the violation of the
sanctity of private property and private confi-
dence? What great public danger demanded the
arrest and imprisonment, without trial by com-*
mon law, of one single private citizen, for an act
done weeks before, openly, and by authority of his
State? If guilty of treason, was not the judicial
power ample enough and strong enough for
his conviction and punishment? What, then,
was needed in his case, but the precedent under
which other men, in other places, might be-
come the victims of executive suspicion and dis-
pleasure?

As to the pretense, sir, that the President has
the constitutional right to suspend the writ of
habeas corpus, I will not waste time in arguing
it. The case is as plain as words can make it.
It is a legislative power; it is found only in the
legislative article; it belongs to Congress only
to do it. Subordinate officers have disobeyed
it; General Wilkinson disobeyed it, but he sent
his prisoners on for judicial trial; General Jack-
son disobeyed it, and was reprimanded by James
Madison; but no President, no body but Con-
gress, ever before assumed the right to suspend it.
And, sir, that other pretense, of necessity,! repeat,
cannot be allowed. It had no existence in fact.
The Constitution cannot be preserved by violating
it. It is an offense to the intelligence of this
House and of the country, to pretend that all this,
and the other gross and multiplied infractions of
the Constitution and usurpations of power were
done by the President and his advisers out of pure
love and devotion to the Constitution. But if so,
sir, then they have but one step further to take,
and declare, in the language of Sir Boyle Roche
in the Irish House of Commons, that such is the
depth of their attachment to it, that they are pre-
pared to give up, not merely a part, but the whole
of the Constitution , to preserve the remainder. And
yet, if indeed this pretext of necessity be well
founded, then let me say, that a cause which
demands the sacrifice of the Constitution and of the
dearest securities of property, liberty, and life,
cannot be just; at least it is not worth the sac-
rifice.

Sir, I am obliged to pass by, for want of time,
other grave and dangerous infractions and usurp-
ations of the President since the fourth of March.
I only allude casually to the quartering of soldiers
in private houses without the consent of the own-
ers, and without any manner having been pre-
scribed by law; to the subversion in a part at least
of Maryland of her own State government and of
the authorities under it: to the censorship over the
telegraph, and the infringement repeatedly, in one
or more of the States, of the right of the people to
keep and to bear arms for their defense. But if all
these things, I ask, have been done in the first two
months after the commencement of this war, and
by men not military chieftains and unused to
arbitrary power, what may we not expect to see
in three years, and by the successful heroes
of the fight? Sir, the power and rights of the
States and the people, and of their Representa-
tives, have been usurped; the sanctity of the pri-
vate house and of private property has been in-
vaded; and the liberty of the person wantonly
and wickedly stricken down; free speech, too,
has been repeatedly denied; and all this under the
plea of necessity. Sir, the right of petition will
follow next — nay, it has already been shaken;
the freedom of the press will soon fall after it;
and let me whisper in your ear, that there will be
few to mourn over its loss, unless, indeed, its an-
cient high and honorable character shall be res-
cued and redeemed from its present reckless men-
dacity and degradation. Freedom of religion will
yield too, at last, amid the exultant shouts of
millions, who have seen its holy temples defiled
and its white robes of a former innocency trampled
now under the polluting hoofs of an ambitious
and faithless or fanatical clergy. Meantime
national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and perma-

8

nent public debt, high tariflfs, heavy direct tax-
tion, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stu-
pendous peculation, anarchy first and a strong
government afterwards, no more State lines, no
more State governments, and a consolidated mon-
archy or vast centralized military despotism, must
all follow in the history of the future, as in the
history of the past they have, centuries ago, been
written. Sir, I have said nothing, and have time
to say nothing now, of the immense indebted-
ness and the vast expenditures which have already
accrued, nor of the folly and mismanagement of
the war so far, nor of the atrocious and shame-
less peculations and frauds which have disgraced
it in the State governments and the Federal Gov-
ernment from the beginning. The avenging hour
for all these will come hereafter, and I pass them
by now.

I have finished now, Mr. Chairman, what I pro-
posed to say at this time upon the message of the
President. As to my own position in regard to
this most unhappy civil war, I have only to say
that I stand to-day just where I stood upon the
fourth of March last; where the whole Democratic
party, and the whole Constitutional Union party,
and a vast majority, as I believe, of the people
of the United States stood too. I am for peace,
speedy, immediate, honorable peace, with all its
blessings. Others may have changed: I have not.
I question not their motives nor quarrel with their
course. It is vain and futile for them to question
or to quarrel with mine. My duty shall be dis-
charged: calmly, firmly, quietly, and regardless
of consequences. The approving voice of a con-
science void of offense, and the approving judg-
ment which shall follow *' after some time be
past," these, God help me, are my trust and my
support. ,

Sir, I have spoken freely and fearlessly to-day,
as became an American Representative and an
American citizen; one firmly resolved, come what
may, not to lose his own constitutional liberties,
nor to surrender his own constitutional rights in
the vain effort to impose these rights and liber-
ties upon ten millions of unwilling people. I have
spoken earnestly, too, but yet not as one unmind-
ful of the solemnity of the scenes which surround
us upon every side to-day. Sir, when the Con-
gress of the United States assembled here on the
3d of December, 1860, just seven months ago, the
Senate was composed of sixty-six Senators, rep-
resenting the thirty-three States of the Union, and
this House of two hundred and thirty-seven mem-
bers— every State being present. It was a grand
and solemn spectacle; the embassadors of three
and thirty sovereignties and of thirty-one million
people, the mightiest republic on earth, in general
Congress assembled. In the Senate, too, and this
House, were some of the ablest and most distin-
guished statesmen of the country; men whose
names were familiar to the whole country — some
of them destined to pass into history. The new
wingsof the Capitol had then but just recently been
finished, in all their gorgeous magnificence, and,
except a hundred marines at the navy-yard, not
a soldier was within forty miles of Washington.

Sir, the Congress of the United States meets
here again to-day; but how changed the scene.
Instead of thirty-four States, twenty-three only,
one less than the number forty years ago, are
here or in the other wing of the Capitol. Forty-
six Senators and a hundred and seventy-three
Representatives constitute the Congress of the
now United States. And of these, eight Senators
and twenty-four Representatives, from four States
only, linger here yet as deputies from that great
South which, from the begmning of the Govenv
ment, contributed so much to mold its policy, to
build up its greatness, and to control its destinies.
All the other States of that South are gone.
Twenty-two Senators and sixty-five Represent-
atives no longer answer to their names. The va-
cant seats are, indeed, still here; and the escutch-
eons of their respective States look down now
solemnly and sadly from these vaulted ceilings.
But the Virginia of Washington and Henry and
Madison, of Marshall and Jefferson, of Randolph
and Monroe, the birth place of Clay, the mother
of states and of presidents; the Carolinas of Pinck-
ney and Sumpter and Marion, of Calhoun and
Macon; and Tennessee, the home and burial
place of Jackson; and other States, too, once
most loyal and true, are no longer here. The
voices and the footsteps of the great dead of the
past two ages of the Republic, linger still, it may
be in echo, along the stately corridors of this
Capitol; but their descendants from nearly one
half of the States of the Republic will meet with
us no more within these marble halls. But in
the parks and lawns, and upon the broad avenues
of this spacious city, seventy thousand soldiers
have supplied their places; and the morning drum-
beat from a score of encampments within sight of
this beleaguered capital, give melancholy warning
to the representatives of the States and of the peo-
ple, that AMID ARMS LAWS ARE SILENT.

Sir, some years hence, I would fain hope some
months hence, if I dare, the present generation
will demand to know the cause of all this; and
some ages hereafter the grand and impartial tri-
bunal of history will make solemn and diligent
inquest of the authors of this terrible revolu-
tion.

APPENDIX.

In reply to a question by Mr. Holman, of In-
diana, in regard to supporting the Government,
Mr. Vallandigham said he would answer in the
words of the following resolution, which he had
prepared, and proposed to offer at a future time:

Resolved, That the Federal Government is the agent of
the people of the several States composing the Union ;
that it consists of three distinct departments— the legisla-
tive, the executive, and the judicial— each equally a part of
the Government, and equally entitled to the confidence and
support of the States and the people ; and that it is the duty
of every patriot'to sustain the several departments of the
Government in the exercise of all tbe constitutional pow-
ers of each which may be necessary and proper for the
preservation of the Government in its principles and in its
vigor and integrity, and to stand by and defend to the ut-
most the flag which represents the Government, the Union,
and the country.